Creating a Custom Pattern

Creating custom patterns is an easy way to add detail to a project and make it more presentable. Getting the pattern you desire, well that's a whole other story. It is as complicated as it can be. The image above is one of our custom tile patterns. I will explain how we got to this pattern later but before I do so, I think it is more important to decode the process of making the code. The way a pattern is made is through a series of numbers, or as Revit calls it, a pattern descriptor.

Exiting Tags

As we all know room tags also have parameters and therefore making a tag display exactly what you need can be tricky.  We have created our own exiting tag that displays the occupant load factor (OLF), the occupancy type, and the number of occupants.  This process took us some time to figure out but at the end it was worth the time spent.  And hopefully, this can help our reader(s) too.

Customizing Viewports

Creating custom viewports on sheets is no longer as simple as drawing a line with text. It's far more intelligent than that now. In our quest to mimic our old viewport settings used in CAD, we came across this family. Like everything in revit, parameters need be set, families loaded, and settings set accurately. Viewports are no different. In this post, I'll go over the process of setting up custom viewports that meet your needs.

DOWNLOAD Four custom viewports with different title settings

After downloading the family, load it onto your project. Once the family has been loaded onto the project and you have placed a detail onto a sheet, you'll have to create a duplicate viewport so that the new settings don't overwrite the existing. I'm sure we've all learned the hard way that if you change the settings on an object, it changes all that have the same instance. Therefore, duplicate the viewport. Right click, go to element properties, duplicate. Name the new viewport accordingly.

Once the new viewport has been created, under the "Title" parameter, the new loaded viewport family should appear. Select it and hit OK until all the type properties windows are closed. And you're done. Repeat this until you've created all the viewports you need.

As a note, if you'd like to create a viewport that is not on the uploaded families, just open one and customize it to fit your needs. Hope this is useful.

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